Overview
We own and maintain https://euglink.org. Its a classic URL shortener and redirector. You give it a long URL and it gives you back a short one. When you make a request for the short url, it redirects to the long URL - for as long as the service lives. Hosting our own service lets us avoid paying bit.ly, manage our own access control, update links at will and control what data is shared to which 3rd paries (none, none.)
The deets
- euglink.org is a fork of Kutt. The source code lives on github.
- The code runs on the `ems-url-shortener` ec2 instance on EMS' AWS account.
- It runs in a docker container on that instance. If you pull new changes onto the instance or change the configuration you need to recreate the docker container with `docker compose up -d --force-recreate`.
- The data is saved in a sqlite database, stored at `/home/admin/kutt-ems/kutt-sqlite-data/data.sqlite`. It needs backing up somewhere...
- Access control is limited to members of the eugenemakerspace.com google workspace for now. If you don't have a @eugenemakerspace.com google account and find you need to create or edit links, talk to Sam or one of the leads and we'll figure something out.
- Kutt does provide a REST API. You need an API key attached to your/an account in the db. That lets you make remote requests to get/post etc. to create new short links. That's handy to batch up a bunch of link creation or integrate with other tools.